


Light Perception Vision

by powercorruptionlies



Series: A Patient Cured is a Customer Lost [2]
Category: Proof (1991)
Genre: Blindness, Drabble Collection, Established Relationship, F/M, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Non-Linear Narrative, Purple Prose, Rape Recovery, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-02
Updated: 2020-08-04
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:07:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25669414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/powercorruptionlies/pseuds/powercorruptionlies
Summary: 'I can feel what you look like, how you're shaped. That's not what I mean. Tell me what your face does when you're happy.'
Relationships: Martin (Proof)/Original Female Character
Series: A Patient Cured is a Customer Lost [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1866394
Kudos: 1





	1. Magnitudes

**Author's Note:**

> this came to me in a fever dream so i wrote it because the heartbreak this movie gave me lives rent-free in my head <3

'Where's your shoulder?'

The sun is the pinnacle of the sky, a swarm of blue holding it in place. Over the tops of the terrace houses on the main road poke rolls of cloud with golden lining around their shadowed underbelly - it's hot, painfully hot, but the sunlight makes their skin smell natural and saccharine, and sort of how it's meant to, Quinn thinks. It's January, and the boxes of Christmas decorations sit by the garage door, waiting there to be hauled inside. Martin hadn't seen the point in putting them up, really, but as he had felt his way around the room, over the fake, woven branches of cranberries with plastic crystals of ice; and then to each soft extension of the evergreen, the individual tendrils falling away at his touch; and then, finally, wrapping his lithe fingers around a glittery bauble and nearly shattering it, he'd grinned, and urged Quinn to get his camera, and to tell him where to point it. 

She watches a fat bee thunk itself gracelessly against her emptied glass of iced tea, enraptured by the creatures poor control over itself, brought back to reality only as a hand paws its way up her face enquiringly. 

'Oh, sorry.' She swings her legs off of his lap and sits upright against him. She vaguely thinks that it's too hot to be in such close proximity with somebody, but it's Martin, so the burn of someone else's skin is pardoned - welcomed, even. 'Here, right here.' 

Gently, slowly, as if the electrons pinging between their fingers in the dead space, whipping up energy, was ample warning that he was about to be touched, she closes her fingers and thumb around his hand, pulling it to her shoulder. The pads of her fingertips roll along the jutting tendons of the back of his hand. 

'God, you're burning,' he tells her, as if she can't feel her own skin, and maybe she can't - not like Martin can, anyway. 

Quinn closes her book on her thumb, the five hundred pages hitting against the knuckle uncomfortably, as she watches him settle. His fingers jump around her skin like a skittish animal, eventually collecting the hair that brushes her exposed shoulders and throwing it behind the curve of skin. She looks back at the sun, disappearing behind the clouds that have finally caught it up, being swallowed up and then regurgitated as a neat circle of white heat. Something hard drops against her clavicle, followed by a thick of soft hair brushing her neck. 

'What're you reading?' He asks once he's settled himself. The sun's warmth is gone completely, and the bee has found its way to the bottom of her glass, licking the sheen of sugary liquid contentedly. Quinn feels a sense of completion and lays a kiss to Martin's temple - his smile reaches his eyes, which is a rarity. 

She spreads the book open across her lap and uses her free hand to card through his hair. It's sandy in colour, malleable and soft under her touch. 'A Little Life. It's awful, in the best possible way.'

'Much like everybody's own _little lives_.'

Quinn hums her agreement and starts reading again. 

'Read some to me. I always thought I'd be dead bookish if, you know, I could see the damned things,' he laughs, but it's hollow. 

She obliges. 

She draws herself to a close, the heat pressing down on her to the point of discomfort, moved to tears by the book, tears that Martin couldn't see, but could hear in her voice. Quinn watches a plane cross the sky, leaving behind a weak trail in its wake, trying to focus on something unremarkable to bore the emotion away. 

'That was...'

'Devastating?' Quinn finishes, setting the book on the table. 

'Something like that.'

'She's a wonderful writer. In three hundred pages, I've gotten no respite. Every turn is a bad one for these characters, it seems.'

'Does that seem unrealistic to you?' Martin asks. He's stretched himself out across the rattan couch, feeling his way down to her lap by groping the plush white cushions beneath them. He looks up at her - well, rather, where he's approximated her to be - and waits for an answer, an answer she doesn't know how to give.

Looking at him, looking at herself, the answer is very simply, 'no,' which seems to be the right answer, though Martin assures her that there was no right and wrong, just her perception of the world, and his, and everyone else's.

'What do you think, then? From your perspective.'

'I think some people just have bad lives. That's not to say they don't have tremendous ups, though, ups that maybe last longer than the bad ever did. It's a spectrum, I suspect.' 

She resists kissing him. She hasn't a reason for doing it, not one that was based in any semblance of truth, anyway, but it was a sort of courtesy she undertook with him, based on all he's been through, though he was always the first to say it didn't effect him to such an extent. She thought better than to believe him wholly. 

'I think for some people it's harder for the good to outweigh the bad - there's simply no time for the good to prosper in the way it would need to, but...'

He runs his hand across his forehead, pushing a strand of hair away. He taps his fingers against his mouth, thinking.

'For others, it's still no small deed, but it's hardly as strenuous. Something or someone comes in at the tail end of all the shit, and you can kind of forget about it for a while.'

By the time he's finished, his fingers have found her own again and he's feeling their shape - stroking down the length ('grief, they're tiny, how sweet.' 'you say this every time, Martin.'), squeezing the joints delicately, lining his own up with her's, running fingertips along her nails ('what colour are they?' 'pink.' 'light, dark, hot...' 'pastel, I suppose.') Eventually, he simply holds her hand, setting it idly against his lips. 

'Martin?' 

'Yes?'

'When you look at the sun, what do you see?'

He goes still, the minutia of his fidgeting drawing to a halt as his eyes wander. She fears she's asked something stupid, though she knows he'd frustratingly tell her she hasn't.

'When I look at the sun, I know I'm looking at something inordinately bright - oh, don't laugh, your coveted _20/20 vision_ can be felled by the sun. Where's the alacrity about that damned thing after its blinded you?' He scolds, though he's laughing right along with her. 'I don't know. I know what I'm looking at, I suppose. Why?'

Quinn shrugs. 'When I close my eyes and look at it, the black goes to red, and then to this odd sort of beige-y colour, and then to bright white the longer I look at it. I wondered if light perception worked in the same way.'

'That doesn't sound healthy. But no, it doesn't. I can tell when it goes from dark, to dim, to bright, like when you turn the light on in the middle of the night,' he mutters with feigned irritation, using her hand to pull her face to his own. She lingers for a while, nose brushing nose, until he closes his eyes and juts his chin forward to peck her on the lips. It's short, and he only catches the corner of her mouth, but she feels herself glowing.

'I can perceive magnitudes, Quinn.'

She opens her eyes.

'I know.'


	2. Autodidact

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> did not come to me in a fever dream (not nearly inebriated enough) but I'm enjoying this tooth-rotting self indulgence. I work through fictional characters' trauma that is greater than my own to negate the need for an actual therapist. Haben Sie einen guten Tag <3

It happens a little while into their relationship, though still before it was defined as such - but it still happens. 

'Describe yourself to me,' Martin had said, demanded, almost, while dragging a finger under the sealed flap of a brown envelope that was branded by the photo developing store down the road. Quinn's seen that envelope plenty of times, but at no point has she seen her own face on shiny, glossy paper emerge from it. Quinn sits with him on the dully coloured sofa while he fans his fingers across the stack of pictures, some she'd been aware he was taking, others more candid, such as her cooking, or sitting in the garden, or reading. He lays them out as best he can, and she has no other option but to look at herself from all sorts of angles. It makes her sick, but at the same time, feel so... a certain way, a feeling she can't articulate. Martin likes to photograph things, have proof of his surroundings during moments he feels are important or indicative of something larger than himself. There were lots of photos of her. Lots. 

Quinn swallows, stroking her fingers across the tacky bits of paper tentatively. She stills on one, one in which she was obviously aware of the lens trained on her face. It's in his front room, a plume of white orchid petals she'd bought at the market in town surrounding her head as she looks straight at the camera with a closed-mouth smile. 'Well, I have a roundish face... my nose is quite small, Goyish, almost - '

Martin groans, a sound of frustration. He fumbles around the splintered wood of the table to pick up one of the photographs. Quinn clenches her stomach, wondering what's wrong. She has half a mind to explain what Goyish means, though it would include a wealth of other, more complicated and abstract concepts, and would definitely break the ten-word-limit. 

'Sorry, did I do it wrong?' She eventually finds it in herself to ask, prepared to receive criticism, something she's always been pathologically averse to.

'Quinn, I can feel what you look like, how you're shaped. That's not what I mean.' 

'Pardon?' She responds, inexplicably floored by his comment.

'I know that you've got a small nose, and how your face is shaped - it's not round, I'll tell you that - how deep set your eyes are, the length of your hair, the curve of your waist and the size of your breasts. I can touch all of that, suss it out for myself, and feel you in relation to myself, and the things around you. I want to know what isn't tactile.'

'Like?' She asks, dumbly.

'The colour of your hair, your eyes, your skin. How your features move.' She watches Martin tap a rhythm onto his thigh, the candid of her reading on the park bench while Bill sniffed at her hands poised between his index and middle fingers. 'Tell me what your face does when you're happy.'

Quinn looks around herself, at a loss. She thought she knew herself, had studied herself in the mirror time and time again and knew all the nuances of her features - each wrinkle and twitch and squint; however, she finds herself reluctantly rising from the sofa to wander to the large mirror over the mantel piece, prodding at her visage as she makes new and exaggerated expressions, describing them as she goes. 

'Where are you?' Martin asks.

'By the fireplace. I'm trying to describe myself to myself, first.' 

'Take your time.'

In a similar vein to Martin's, her fingers crawl up her face and squeeze each part of it, determining the most simple comparisons for each aspect. She tries to inspire a happy expression, the whole thing feeling disingenuous and forced. It makes her doubt how others must perceive her, as there must be an expression she's made that she's never seen for herself, possibly one that contorts and disfigures her face beyond any sort of recognition - and then she catches sight of Martin in the mirror, sitting patiently on the cushion, fiddling with the pictures. If she had any chance of experiencing herself in any true way, Martin would be the gateway. Someday he'll come through the door with the most grotesque, revealing photograph of her, and she'll have to describe it to him as honestly as he deserves - which, in her opinion, is entirely.

When she looks back in the mirror, she starts describing everything she can see.

'When I'm happy, my cheeks round and harden. They've got a sort of flush to them, a dusting of warm colours, sort of like little plums. I don't really smile with my mouth open, I'm not in any of those pictures that you've got, and my mouth goes sort of small but my lips thicken when it upturns.'

'What colour are your lips?'

She drags her bottom lip down with her finger. 'Uh. A medium pink. Sort of blunt. Not too bright, but they're not dark.' 

'I don't know if it's a blessing or a curse that I've ended up with a writer.'

Quinn snorts. 'Neither do I, really. I feel as if flowery descriptions don't help you much.'

She sees Martin frown in the mirror. 'I think it does,' he says, quietly. 'The more information, the better.'

'Well, my eyes go narrow and I get little lines coming from them when they crease. My cheeks are sort of crushing them, that's how high they are.'

'And what colour are your eyes?'

'Dark, dark brown. Almost black. When the sun hits them, they go a bit golden in places.' She turns and looks at Martin, studying his eyes. 'I love your eyes. Infinitely more beautiful than mine, the blue.'

Martin doesn't say anything for a while, but his fingers drag along his eyelashes, tracing his eye socket. 

'My eyes are blue?' He asks eventually.

'The brightest,' Quinn manages to tell him, ignoring how she feels that he's made it this far in life, begging everyone around him to tell him what's what and what everything looks like, and nobody's ever bothered to tell him about his eyes. They're gorgeous, striking, arresting, she wants to say, but can't let the syllables leave her tongue, which is growing thicker by the minute. She has to swallow it all down, and it rips her throat. 

'Thank you, Quinn,' he says, patting the cushion beside him. She takes it again and ventures a closer look at each of the pictures.

'How do you know where to point the camera?'

'Dumb luck,' Martin tells her. And then, he can't help but laugh, and extend his arm until his elbow reaches her ribs. 'Kidding. Noises. I listen to where you are.'

'Ah. Like a bat.'

'I've _never_ heard that one before.'

'Oh, quiet,' she chides, shifting to put her chin to his shoulder. He flinches at the new weight, but doesn't shake her off. 

There's a few beats of silence, the grandfather clock in the hallway ticking louder and louder the longer the silence permeates the room. 

'I think I can picture you better, now.'

'That's good. I never knew if it was a blessing or a curse that you couldn't see me for me.'

Martin appears to do a double take. 'What do you mean?'

Quinn takes a breath, straightening herself up and rubbing his shoulders as a diversion for herself. 'Sometimes I wish people didn't see me at all. I used to stay in the house for days because I couldn't stomach the idea of being seen.'

Martin hums. 

'I would give anything to see you.'

Quinn doesn't dispute it, even less does she feel the urge to make an offhand, self-deprecating comment. It isn't worth it. She knows she's not supposed to pity Martin, but the statement almost persuades her to feel something akin to it. 

'Anything else you need me to describe?' She begins after the silence grows too meaningful. 

Martin sighs. 'No, I don't think so. It's taxing for you, as well.' He then cranes his neck around, his eyes falling on her own. She knows it's either a product of spectacular guesswork, or possibly some newly developed affinity. Whatever it is that lead to such accuracy, she feels unduly special. Martin can't see the embarrassing pride in her expression, and maybe he never would, unless he happened to capture it with the camera, and then she'd feel obliged to expose herself to him. 

'Kind of. I don't mind terribly, though,' she decides, and she's not even lying. Describing images had started out as a good exercise, and now it had sprawled into a task she enjoyed simply because it helped somebody she liked and valued. Disregarding his reassurances, she stacks the pictures into a pile and shuffles them, smiling at the attention he'd paid to her. 

'So, in this one, I'm on a bench, and it's wet because it rained like hell earlier in the day. There's a load of bushes behind me and the whole picture is green, besides myself, and the book I've got. It's this philosophical nightmare about religion and paternity. It's Russian, which I suspect is why I like it.'

Martin's face softens. He leans back into the couch, listening to her describe each of the images. 

'Oh, God! You evil shit... I'm absolutely stuffing my face in this one...'


	3. Sanguine

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> listened to tusk... wrote this. am now inebriated. this is dumb (this whole pursuit is).. feels like this should come later in the collection but I wanted instant gratification. jouir.

Martin makes himself a bowl of muesli. It's four in the afternoon, and the sunlight is comfortably pouring through the kitchen window, the only barrier being the thin white curtains which have grown greasy after years of food being haphazardly baked and cooked in the room. 

'Cereal?' He offers. Quinn shakes her head, before realising that she has to verbalise her disagreement. 

'I'm alright,' she says, smiling as he pours the milk, stopping with a definitiveness she could only dream of. _It's the sound_ , he always told her, whether it be milk in cereal, or water in a cup, or wine in the special cut-glass goblets he owned. 

He scoops the bowl into one hand, feeling in front of himself with another, until he reaches the chair opposite to her. He sits and eats, unashamed, totally void of any self-consciousness - Quinn envies this, an apparent lack of awareness of one's own form. Quinn reasons that Martin isn't uncouth in appearance, and that nobody would cast judgement on him, anyway; yet despite herself she applies the same harshness to everyone else that she assumes is applied to herself, though rationally, if pressed, she could admit that it's unlikely anybody takes issue with anybody else in the way she imagines. 

'What do you want for dinner tonight?' She enquires, drawing on a napkin in place of expending her energy to get a sketchbook. She might be drawing Martin, she isn't certain, though the curve of the eyebrow and the crease on the root of the nose is indicative of his profile. Quinn glances up from her loose estimation of him, regarding Martin in the flesh, and lets herself feel the gentle smile break across her face at just how beautiful her lover is. It's hard to express this to him, however, the trust needing to be built up from subsurface levels. Not all had been revealed to her, though she had been around at the time it had all started going downhill. 

'We could try that Caribbean restaurant in town. I'll pay, I just sold off some photos from a while ago.'

Martin goes quiet as he explains, words articulated between mouthfuls of drenched oats. 

'Of who?'

He coughs. He takes his time finishing the mouthful before answering.

'Celia, I reckon. I don't recall ever taking them, but they ended up in the pile. I thought it was just pictures of the forest at the back of the park, but the bloke I sold them to kept telling me how I'd captured this woman so well.' He drags his spoon through the bowl distastefully, wrinkling his nose. 'I knew it couldn't have been you, the pictures were from an old collection, but I asked him to tell me what she looked like, anyway. Maybe it was a sick joke on myself.'

Quinn freezes up, shading the napkin excessively, tearing it with the sharp graphite point. _Shit_. 'And?'

'He said she had short hair, and that she was plain looking. Basically how Andy described her - but, of course, he still had sex with her. Neither descriptions suit you, so... must've been Celia.'

Quinn stretches her hand across the table, but draws her fingers back into an aching crunch before she can reach his own. She observes the way the bones in her hands define themselves and separate as she tenses them beneath her thin skin, mixing with her veins. Partially, she does this to evaluate how she'd detail it to Martin, should he ever wish to know what tendons look like when they're poking through flesh. 

'That's kind of you to say,' she tells him, setting her hand in her lap with a sort of shame.

Part of her wishes she knew exactly what had happened with Celia. Something unsavoury, something insidious, but nothing Martin thus far has been able to put into words. Quinn needn't force it, she had the gist of it purely through vignettes of her behaviour Martin had recounted to her, partly-nervous, partly-monotonous, as if it were a routine duty he _had_ to be carrying out. What she's heard up till now has made her sick enough, filled her with astringent rage that she's never let Martin in on - and maybe she's wrong in doing that, in aggrandising the situation. She considers this sometimes, mainly when she's struck with how mundane everything can be, that everyday isn't occupied with some earth-shattering revelation or an incandescent conversation. Sometimes she and Martin don't speak at all: sometimes they watch terrible true-crime shows on daytime TV when Quinn doesn't have to go to work; or she rifles through vinyls with torn sleeves, layers of cardboard coming away from each other, until she decides to put one on; and sometimes, there's just nothing, neither of them _do_ anything but bask in the awareness of each other's company - and that, really, proves to be enough for both.

'It's nothing, really. I'm just telling you the truth.' 

That word - _truth_. She daren't say anything, because it's such a quintessential Martin-ism that it feels cruel to take that away from him, too, but she struggles to find _truth_ in the categorical omission of detail whenever he tries to talk about Celia. It always begins as if it means to be expository, but descends into a circumlocutory story about how she always charged him extra if she bought more bleach or another pack of Brillo pads, and how he never believed her. The changes of subject, scenes and dialogue relayed in a staccato, as if trying to piece together a censored story for her so he wouldn't have _technically_ backed out of revealing something about himself. Quinn doesn't mind that he can't tell her what he really wants to tell her, so much as she minds the enigmatic, repetitive half-truths that serve as a meretricious veil, a veil she feels that she, herself, isn't allowed to possess. 

Martin finds his way to the sink and manages to wash the bowl up himself. Quinn looks down at the napkin, the prototype of Martin split down the middle. She balls it up and takes it to the bin, a movement which Martin follows by ear.

'You're being awfully quiet.'

It sounds like an accusation, but Quinn knows, has come to know, that this is the only way Martin knows how to make his observations. 

'Is everything alright?'

She lets the napkin go. Her hands feel empty and idle, like she's lost something of herself. With Martin, there's no white lies or carefully curated fragmentations of honesty. There could be, for it was so easy - he couldn't see her physical tells, the tugging on the cartilage of her ear or wrapping her hand loosely around her throat and pushing it into her jaw. But, of course, this is the point, to be able to resist something so easily, so carelessly done. Martin, for all the work everybody assumes him to be, has the potential to be a highly sought-after companion: you can, ostensibly, get away with most anything, as long as all that's lying is your actions. He can tell when you've got a new scent on you, the cadence of your voice if you're trying to hide certain emotions or a quiver. It's not often you come across someone that can be manipulated like Martin can. Andy had told her that for free. 

'No, not really.'

'Is it something I've done?'

She speaks as if describing a photograph. 'Not strictly speaking.' 

'What does that mean?'

Quinn meets him at the sink, brushing his cheek. 'It's - ' _don't say nothing, don't say nothing -_ 'I've just overthought something, is all.'

Martin reaches his arm up, hand hovering above her wrist. 'May I?'

'Sure.'

He plants his hand around her wrist, holding it where it is against his face. She finds his consistent need for permission endearing, if not a little jarring. There's something behind that habit, too, something Quinn doesn't know she's waiting to be told. 

'You know I value your honesty, Quinn.'

'Yes.'

'You're still telling me the truth? Even about yourself?'

Quinn chews on her lip. 'Sometimes it's hard to be honest about yourself. You know that, I expect.'

'Sorry?'

'You don't always tell _me_ everything, do you?'

Martin's breath hitches. 

'Sometimes it's a little... fudged,' she clarifies. 'And I can admit that I do that, too. Because I'm not totally ready to say everything all the time. I've never, never lied to you about anything - but I've perhaps not told you everything, not about myself.'

'You have a right to privacy.'

'As do you.'

His grip tightens on her and he squeezes his eyes shut. Quinn wonders if he has any idea as to what his face conveys when he contorts it into certain expressions, expressions purer and more undiluted than people that are able to catch themselves making an unkind expression in their hazy reflection in a shop window and adjust and mute their angles accordingly. 

'Celia took photographs of me. I didn't know about it until Andy told me. She has them all over her flat - wall to wall, the tables, the mantel - in Andy's words, at least.' 

His fingers tighten around her wrist so hard that they slip and roll her skin around the two nodes on either side of it. 

'She - she took one of me in the bathroom. She threatened to show people, hand it around, if I didn't take her out.'

'Martin -'

'She always made me touch her breasts. She'd grab my hand and put my fingers around them. She put them in my face and told me that I wanted it. I don't know if I did. I don't think I did.'

'Martin -' 

'She touched me. It felt incredible, and then I remembered who it was, and it just felt so - so - _'_

_'Martin.'_

_' - Impure.'_

He stops fretting and Quinn watches his eyes go colder than usual. Nothing can soothe the pit of consternation opening in her abdomen.

'Martin, I'm... I don't know what to say.'

'Then don't.'

His hand slips down her arm and falls limply to his side, bouncing against his thighs. 

'I don't think I want to go out tonight,' he tells her, already walking out of the kitchen. 'You can do what you'd like.'

His name sits on her tongue, as well as reprimand on reprimand for herself. _What a fucking idiot I am_ , she thinks as he disappears into the alcove with the stairs. Habitually, she cuts out all noise around her, listening to make sure he takes twelve steps, and then the creaking when he reaches the landing, and finally, to hear the bedroom door close. She turns to white-knuckle the basin of the sink, looking at the cloudy water as it mixes with the remainder of the milk and the repulsive-looking bits of cereal, a simulacrum of her reflected blearily back at her.


	4. Gloaming I

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I used to live in a ghastly suburb, can you tell?

There's a couple that walk their dogs past the house every other morning. This morning, the man stalks ahead of his wife with their black Collie, whistling to himself. Quinn watches all of this from the bedroom window, wringing her hands as she stands in the square of sun defined by the shadow of the window stretched out on the carpet. His wife drags behind with a chihuahua, scowling.

'What're we looking at?' Martin asks from the wardrobe. He's buttoning up a brick-red shirt. Andy's invited the pair as his plus-ones to a (self-described) 'suburban summer nightmare', which Quinn took to mean 'barbecue at your middle-class friends' house'. 

'Those dog walkers. His wife looks miserable, but he was having the time of his life.'

'Are they old?'

Quinn tilts her mouth. 'Sort of. Sixties, maybe. She looks younger than he does. And markedly less feral.' 

'Poor bloke, subject to such scrutiny,' Martin muses, humming a laugh. 'Have I buttoned this right?'

Quinn looks over her shoulder. 'Perfectly,' she tells him with ease.

He grins in her direction. 'What're you wearing? - actually, I'd like to take a photo, if that's alright with you.'

She rubs the pink material of the dress between her fingers, tracing the blue and beige petals printed onto the pleated fabric. 'Go ahead.'

After he's taken enough, he asks to feel the fabric, and won't touch her unless she guides him, and tells him where on her body she's leading him to. 

'You’re on my hip, the skirt's the nicest bit to feel, I think,' she explains as he grabs a handful, exposing some of her thigh. She can't help but flush as his fingers catch the space between her hip bones and lower-stomach, trying desperately not to flinch at the rippling sensitivity. She wants Martin to touch her beyond a slip of material covering her body, but she hasn't found the words to ask him to. He rubs the dress as she had, using both hands to drag his thumbs across the stretch of material.

'It's sort of rough, is that comfortable?'

'It's silky on the inside, feel.' Quinn inverts part of the dress and he clings to the soft lining. 

'Colour?' 

'Pink, it's got blue and cream-coloured flowers on it, though. Quite seasonal.' 

'It sounds lovely.' 

Martin drops the bunched-up fabric and it tickles her skin. She smooths it out where it had creased under inquisitive gropes, something Martin seldom let on that he enjoyed doing, yet his fascination with the tactility of people's forms and clothes and appearances was perplexingly obvious whenever she told him he could. Quinn picks up his hands again. 

'Here, I'm leading you to my hair - it's held back with a headband.'

His fingers press down firmly on the black cotton framed by her hair ('you've straightened it. It's usually bigger than this.') He prods at it until he reaches her forehead, alleviating some of the pressure as he trails his fingertips down the side of her face, stopping at her chin. 

'You can feel all of my face, if you'd like.'

'Are you sure? My mother never liked me to. She said people hardly appreciated being poked at and blindly voyeured.'

'She said blindly voyeured? Those words actually left her mouth?'

Martin makes a sound of amusement. 'Yes, she was hardly the most subtle of women.' He draws his thumb across the dip between her jawbone and her chin. 'Are you sure?' 

'Of course I'm sure,' she almost gasps, having been curious about this sort of thing since she'd met him those months ago. 

His hands work separately but cleave to symmetry she doubts is present on her face. First spreading along her jawline either side of her face, stopping at her ears before doubling back on themselves to encircle her cheeks, tracing her eye sockets, assessing their depth and where her eyes stop and start. 

'Your eyelashes are hard.'

'Mascara.'

'Ah.' He withdraws his hands. 'You're wearing makeup. I hope I didn't mess it up.'

She looks over his shoulder to the small mirror she'd brought with her, for whenever she stays the night. 

'It's intact. You needn't worry so much.'

'Worry's not always a bad thing. It's a necessary barrier, sometimes.'

Quinn opens and closes her mouth, but everything she could say feels inadequate. Instead, she says she's putting her arm through his own, one of the only ways of helping him get from point A to point B that he doesn't think is overtly infantilising, and leads him to the door. 

-

'You know, you two are the most inconvenient people to be together,' Andy teases them as they sit in traffic. Quinn watches him chew his knuckle as he looks at the rows and rows of cars disparagingly. He catches her in the rearview mirror and cranes his neck to give her a rakish smile. 'In some ways.'

'Why?' Martin asks from the seat beside Quinn, unfolding and refolding the joints of his cane. 

'Well, one of you's blind,' Andy starts, lurching the car into a crawl as traffic drips through the next set of lights. 'And the other's bloody epileptic.'

Quinn laughs, enviously watching the cars going down the other side of the highway, speeding towards inner-city Sydney rather than away from it and towards the gentrified, grassy suburbs. 

'So?'

'Well, neither of you can drive. I'm like your chauffeur. It's a nightmare,' Andy says, making sure his voice is coated with enough exaggeration that Martin knows he means nothing by it. Quinn realises that she only has to look at the way somebody smiles despite their tone, or the look behind their eyes, and she knows she's not in any trouble with them, and Martin doesn't have that privilege. She glances at him, assuring herself that he knows Andy doesn't mean it - there's a subtle smile on his face that dissolves back into his skin as he looks at his lap. 

'Chauffeuring us to _your_ event, Andy,' Martin says, sliding his palm across the interior of the door to find the window lever.

'Point taken. But, come on, I can't handle these people by myself. You get it, don't you, Quinn?'

She chews on a nail. 'Unfortunately.'

'Why, what's the matter with them?' Martin asks. Quinn thinks back to the awkward small-talk between herself and people that had deemed themselves infinitely more refined and successful than herself because she lived in a flat in the city, worked for a publishing house, and had no plans for children, a revelation which almost always coincided with a child at the party screaming because they'd fallen over, or hitting their parent in a misplaced rage. ('Oh, but you'll _love_ them when they're yours.') And then the stodgy food, too filling and not that good; too much alcohol being served when you get there and not enough left when you really need it as you reach your sixth hour at the affair; being tired and cold as the sky above you turns a pristine, cloudless navy, and the only sign of the sun ever blazing down upon you are the pinkish wisps of cloud far in the distance, sinking, sinking and dissolving.

She and Andy share another loaded look in the mirror. 

'They're just... awkward. There's a lot of friction involved,' Andy offers, finally breaking free of the gridlock as he finds a side road. 'You'll see.'

'I might be able to _hear_ it,' Martin mutters, tilting his head towards the wind blustering in through his window, sliding his sunglasses off as the sunlight flickers through the tree leaves. Quinn thinks that he must be able to pick up on that much, at least, a pure and very fundamental way of understanding the shape of a world outside of your own. 


End file.
